Through much of May, Castro honed his skill at multitasking, now calling for “mines, grenades, ammunition of all classes,” now ordering a redeployment of troops to a key mountain pass, now asking Sánchez to expedite delivery of money to the sick mother of a captured soldier (“make it happen,” he ordered).14 Being good at multitasking does not make it enjoyable. Susceptible to mood swings, Castro rebelled against the endless administrative tasks that fell his way as a result of his inability to delegate authority. He longed to be out doing the fighting (“how I miss the days when I was a real soldier,” he told Sánchez), but did not trust others to exercise leadership in his place. In public, he kept his chin up and always exuded great confidence; in private, he confided to Sánchez that the war had become “a miserable and meaningless bureaucratic slog.” He was fed up “with being the boss, running around like a chicken with its head off, forced to attend to one trivial thing after another because someone forgot this or overlooked that.” Surely a solipsistic micromanager had brought this on himself.15
He had another weak spot. Having grown up amid plenty, Castro was unaccustomed to the deprivation of guerrilla life. Even in prison he could count on a minimal level of comfort and good food provided by family and friends. And so a commander in chief who could not countenance other people’s complaints occasionally succumbed to complaining himself. “I’m eating very poorly,” he wrote Sánchez in early May. “There’s no attention paid to food here—none. When six o’clock arrives, after 12 hours of work, I am completely scatterbrained.” More reliant on Sánchez than ever, he grew petulant at gaps in their communication. “Yesterday I received no word from you,” he wrote. “I won’t write any more as my mood is foul.” Two weeks later, things had not improved. “I have no tobacco,” he wrote, “I have no wine, I have nothing. In his refrigerator, Bismarck’s kept a bottle of rose, sweet, Spanish. Where is it?”16
There is nothing like a military invasion to take one’s mind off life’s inconveniences. Self-pitying at times, Castro displayed laserlike focus when conditions called for it. Up to this point in his military career, Castro’s leadership had been characterized more by daring and audacity than by strategic and tactical acumen. Though he read heavily in wars and revolutions, he never received any formal training. His comfort in the mountains equipped him to elude and harass small parties of government soldiers, but that stage of the war had ended, and the guerrillas were destined to confront the closest thing to pitched battles that the Sierra Maestra would allow. As he prepared for this, Castro was not without resources of his own, principal among them his authority over his men, his long-recognized intuition, and his photographic memory. All of these would prove invaluable in the difficult days ahead.
On May 8, the first troops of Plan F-F arrived in the Sierra. At the insistence of his own men, Castro had long since retreated from the front lines, and was now issuing orders from on high. He had a lot of territory to protect and too few people to protect it. It fell to an indefatigable captain named Ramón Paz to establish simultaneously two posts over twelve miles and four thousand vertical feet apart on opposite sides of the mountain below the rebel stronghold on the same morning. His notes to Paz suggest that Castro expected the enemy to approach from three directions at once: from the south (the coast), up the La Plata and adjacent river valleys; from the northeast, where the village of Santo Domingo afforded access to Castro’s doorstep via a dependable road; and from the northwest, where a series of small villages served as stepping-stones leading up the high Sierra, just behind his back. Naturally, Castro wanted to engage the invaders as far down the mountain as possible. He ordered Paz to defend the territory by posting snipers, laying mines, and setting ambushes “at every turn in the road.” This was a “decisive moment,” he said. “We must fight as never before.”17
In fact, the 18th Battalion did not advance from its position along the coast for over a month, as if afraid to enter the Sierra Maestra on its own. This allowed Castro to continue his public relations campaign and prepare the local citizens for battle. In mid-month the Chicago Tribune’s Jules Dubois took advantage of the pause to visit Castro and evaluate his ideological development. The Cuban government insisted Castro was a communist; what had Castro to say about that, Dubois wanted to know. He was not now nor ever had been communist, Castro told Dubois. He blamed the talk of communism on Batista, who promoted the rumor in order “to continue to obtain weapons from the United States.”18
Later that month, Castro convened a peasant assembly in the village of Vegas de Jibacoa, northwest of La Plata. With residents pouring in from towns throughout the region, he warned of the violence and hardship to come and discussed measures to safeguard the Sierra’s lucrative coffee harvest and alleviate the effects of the military blockade. Israel Rodríguez Serano, one of fourteen children from a local peasant family, remembers attending the meeting with his father. Acknowledging the people’s sacrifices, Castro asked attendees to keep their eyes on the prize: land, education, and health care reform, reliable work, better housing, and an economy dedicated to the welfare of Cubans as a whole. “My family was not overly cultivated,” Serano said, “but we understood what Fidel meant when he said that too many people lived like animals.” The young Serano found Castro courteous and down-to-earth. “He always treated peasants with the best manners,” Serano explained, “as if they were members of his own family.”19
Battle broke out in the neighborhood of Vegas de Jiboaca that very day, when the 17th Battalion, commanded by Pablo Corzo and backed by tanks, aerial bombardment, and mortar fire, advanced on the village of Las Mercedes, some ten miles northwest of Castro’s headquarters. Adopting tactics that had proved effective in the first stage of the war, Castro’s men lay concealed in the forest, as Corzo’s column wended its way into the hills. After several hours’ march, relieved not to have encountered any opposition, the 17th Battalion lowered its guard, stopping at a natural resting place on the outskirts of town. The rebels opened fire, taking out the advanced guard and pinning down the enemy for several hours. Eventually Corzo steadied his troops, and, exploiting his advantage in firepower, forced the rebels back. The 17th pushed on, its complacency banished by the grim reality of stepping over the bodies of fallen comrades.
The next surprise for the 17th came not from the woods but from a fifty-pound bomb planted in the roadway. The explosion obliterated the head of the column, sowing panic among the green recruits and forcing Corzo to corral his troops once more. The rebels made his task extremely difficult, pelting the soldiers with fire from the cover of the woods. For thirty-six hours, the battle continued: the army advancing, the rebels lying in wait, an ambush unleashed, the advance guard taken out, the rebels falling back, Corzo and company forging on, now thoroughly disheartened. In the end, the 17th suffered seven deaths and many injured, the rebels no deaths and one injury. With few men and scarce resources, the rebels were unlikely to win these battles. But they served their purpose of putting the enemy on notice and slowing its advance. In this case, seven losses were enough for Corzo, who decided to pause at Las Mercedes and convert the village into his base, which he did only after setting fire to peasant houses and murdering local men and boys thought to be collaborating with the enemy. The dismembered body of one young boy was found slung over a bridge in the nearby village of Calambrosio as a warning to local residents.20
Gratified by the rebels’ stand, Castro had no illusions about the scale of the task ahead. Exponentially outmanned (his entire force is said to have numbered under three hundred troops, the government close to ten thousand), he nevertheless liked his chances of repelling an unpopular army from a territory he knew well—so long as he had the guns and ammunition. Over a year and half into the war, ammunition remained a pressing problem, and Castro’s consolidation of power put that problem squarely in his own lap. “The imperative of the moment is to save bullets,” he told commander Horacio Rodríguez on June 3. “Day in and day out, our worst enemy is not the Army, but the idiots who fire their guns for pleasure.” A few days later, he told Celia Sánchez that he was by and large pleased with the state of the rebel defenses. “The problem that worries me most,” he said, “is that the troops don’t realize in a battle of continual and escalating resistance, you can’t expend in two hours ammunition that has to last a month.” Nothing was more crucial to the rebels’ success, he told Sánchez, than marshaling scarce resources effectively. “I will not give a single bullet to anybody if it’s not a question of life or death, as truthfully there will be no bullets left.” This problem “is our Achilles heel.”
In mid-June Castro continued to summon his commanders back toward the Santo Domingo/La Plata zone. “I need you here with all the good arms that you can muster,” he told Camilo Cienfuegos; a huge battle was about to take place as the government was concentrating its forces on the guerrillas’ command post.21 On June 12, the enemy was amassing in the three directions that Castro had anticipated. “There is a veritable sea of soldiers descending on us,” he wrote Ramón Paz.22 By June 18, the battle looked imminent, and Castro positioned his troops with pinpoint precision. He clearly relished the chess game. “The enemy’s main objective on the coast is to take La Plata, since they surely know we have an airfield there,” he told Paz. The 18th Battalion was likely to advance via Palma Mocha, he said, which was “a terrific spot for us to trap them.” In issuing orders, Castro relied on his photographic memory of the local terrain, down to the last footpath and peasant home. “Cuevas should position himself on the banks of the Palma Mocha,” Castro wrote, “the side closest to La Plata, by the footpath leading down to the river, and entrench himself there against the frigates and airplanes, so as to control the banks and the plains of the river’s mouth.” That way, the rebels would be “able to surprise and drive off any troops that arrive there.” With another group of men upriver and five more men between Palma Mocha and Las Cuevas, the rebels would stop reinforcements coming to the soldiers’ defense. Those last five should occupy “the upper part of the pass,” Castro emphasized, “taking care not to be trapped between the road and the sea.”23
After Cienfuegos, the next to be summoned home were Ramiro Valdés, Juan Almeida, and Guillermo García. Castro greeted them with the same warning he had greeted the others. This next stage in the war would be long and hard, he said. But when it concluded, Batista’s end would be nigh. Batista was all too aware of this, Castro advised, and “for that reason he’ll risk anything.” The army possessed greater numbers and better firepower. The rebels knew the terrain and had local support. They would exploit that as long as possible, thereby “bleeding and exhausting the army.” From a succession of modest victories, the rebels would harvest the resources necessary to launch a counteroffensive of their own, just as the enemy began to crack. In the meantime, he urged his friends to check their pride, fall back, concentrate their forces, and maintain an impenetrable nucleus. “These are bitter measures,” Castro acknowledged, “like all measures adopted in difficult times.”
He told the men to bring along food and other supplies needed to sustain them, including their livestock. Some would have to be slaughtered and smoked, some should “be kept alive to provide fresh meat.” The same was true for grains and other supplies. And they must take every precaution in establishing their new camp, including constructing “reinforced tunnels for antiaircraft shelters.” Again, Castro’s detailed memory of the local terrain informed his commands. “If the enemy manages to reach the hill at La Maestra by way of Santana,” he warned, “you must withdraw the squads protecting the area of El Hombrito and Alto Escudero. Order them at once to take the road from La Gloria to the little house of the boy from Villa Clara in the Maestra, and to dig trenches on the road to Santana up to La Nevada.” There, they should establish entrenched gun positions “along the hill at the cemetery to protect the approach to Malverde.” Meanwhile, Paz and Miret would protect them from the sea. They should also identify the absolute best positions from which to ambush the approaching soldiers, protecting their supply depot and headquarters at all cost. This was do or die, he said; the rebel command post must not be taken under any circumstances. If Valdés, Almeida, and García were successful here, they would have to retreat no further. With the peaks of El Turquino on one side and La Maestra on the other, and Castro’s column protecting them from the side, it would be impossible for the army to overrun the guerrillas.
Castro signed off like a worried parent telling a child to wear her seatbelt. Don’t neglect the trenches! he warned; they must be “real excavations” capable of standing up to anything, “not just ridiculous little holes, which is what the vast majority tend to do.” Proper defenses could stop the army in its tracks. Just look at what his column did at Las Mercedes, he said, where seven rebels “with 350 bullets” halted an entire brigade, before concluding “that seemed like a lot of bullets to me.”24
Fighting erupted on the morning of June 19. With the enemy advancing on the La Plata valley from three directions, Castro felt isolated and exposed. He would later refer to the government offensive as “D-Day.” The live fire interrupted his supply lines, cutting off communication with his commanders. “I have nothing but my rifle here to confront the situation,” he wrote Guevara, who arrived in the region around noon. Early that morning, Castro had ordered Guevara to send him men, and had long since despaired of waiting. “I absolutely need the men I asked you for this morning if we are even going to make an attempt to save the La Plata zone,” he said. Meanwhile, he had heard nothing from Paz, who was all that stood between the command post and the 18th Battalion, Major José Quevedo in charge. Castro had incorrectly anticipated Quevedo’s route, allowing the Cuban commander to dodge Paz and Miret and dash up the west side of the Palma Mocha River, leaving Paz (and all seven of his men) in a frantic chase to catch up. Castro’s scouts had lost track of Quevedo, and the whole territory looked to be in jeopardy.25
Again the Sierra came to Castro’s aid. It simply did not lend itself to an assault carried out by large columns of soldiers advancing en masse. When Paz discovered Quevedo’s gambit, he dispatched several of his fittest men to parallel Quevedo’s move up a local peak named Naranjal, until they arrived at terrain suitable for setting an ambush. Meanwhile, the others followed as fast as they could to at least slow, if not repel Quevedo’s approach. The plan worked. The 18th Battalion stopped, with Quevedo ultimately digging in for the night, thereby sealing his fate—and not just for the next day but permanently. Quevedo’s halt allowed Castro and Guevara and others to send reinforcements, which ultimately stalled the offensive while cutting off Quevedo’s retreat. The rebels had similar success on the other side of the mountain, with sets of well-placed troops stopping the 11th and 22nd Battalions in their tracks. If not exactly a victory—the 11th and 22nd occupied the village of Santo Domingo—this was a major accomplishment, imbuing the rebels with confidence while sowing doubt in the minds of the mostly young men who comprised the army rank and file.
Castro did not sleep that night, recalling it as “one of the worst in the entire war.” The next day, having learned of Paz’s success, a relieved commander had warm words for the young captain. “You have no idea how valuable it is right now that you repelled the guards on this road,” Castro wrote. “I congratulate you, and the brave comrades accompanying you, both on your decision and your action.”26 This was just the beginning of the engagement however. Castro ordered Paz to hold the line, Miret to reinforce Paz. It was absolutely crucial, Castro wrote Miret, that they protect their own escape route. If the enemy got behind them, their retreat would be cut off, their columns wiped out, with the invaders gaining unimpeded access to La Plata. Patience and discipline, Castro counseled; this was not the time to take the battle to the enemy. The two must fortify and improve their trenches. The imperative now was simply to live to fight another day.27
The men did as they were told. When Quevedo’s troops tried to outflank the rebels early the next day, they were greeted by withering fire resulting in many casualties. “Luckily you always make the right decisions when you have to resolve anything because you keep calm at all times,” Castro wrote Paz. As a reward, Castro sent along some special treats—“a little packet of tobacco” for him, “a big one for everybody in your squad”—before asking Paz to check in on his neighbors. “Make sure the people from Palma Mocha and Las Cuevas who had taken refuge don’t go hungry,” Castro ordered. “Have some cattle killed for them.”28
From the army’s perspective, this was an inauspicious start to Plan F-F. Castro predicted that frustrated commanders would force their men up into the hills, which is exactly what they did. There was grave danger in this for Castro and his men; if Quevedo’s battalion breached the rebel lines, Castro’s command post would be overrun. But there was also opportunity. With only so many routes for the soldiers to advance, the rebels converted the Sierra into a death trap, inviting the soldiers into the few good mustering points before systematically cutting them down. By the end of “D-Day,” the rebel defense had gone about as well as Castro could have wished. The rebels had successfully stalled the advance and secured their command post, radio station, weapons depot, hospital, and airfield. Perhaps more significantly, Castro had established a defensive line running from east to west atop the Sierra Maestra, thereby cutting off the coast from the towns and cities to the north, effectively isolating Quevedo and all but ensuring his end.29
Castro could not have known it at the time, but June 19 was the last time that the rebels would face simultaneous attacks from the south (the coast), the northeast (Santo Domingo), and northwest (Las Mercedes/Vegas de Jibacoa). Though hardly decisive, the rebels’ resistance that day succeeded in casting doubt in the minds of Batista’s commanders, many of whom paused in their camps as if unsure of how to proceed in an environment that favored the enemy. Repelled by an ambush along the Yara River just outside his headquarters in Santo Domingo, for instance, Colonel Ángel Sánchez Mosquera, commander of the 11th Battalion, simply hunkered down, awaiting backup from yet another entire battalion (the 22nd), which arrived outside Santo Domingo on the 28th.
With Sánchez Mosquera’s blessing, and apparently without a word of warning, the 22nd Battalion took the same route that Sánchez Mosquera’s advance guard had taken weeks earlier, marching straight into the path of a massive land mine followed by an ambush that wiped out the better part of two companies, while scattering a third in an undisciplined retreat. The following day Quinteto Rebelde made its debut, but only after Sánchez Mosquera sent yet another company to its doom up the same bank of the Yara River where it was met by yet another land mine. Besides leaving the rebels with a cornucopia of automatic weapons, ammunition, mortars, and other spoils of war, the army’s folly in dispatching full companies up steep, deeply wooded mountain paths confronted the rebels with a new challenge, namely, managing large numbers of prisoners. In three days of fighting outside Santo Domingo at the end of June, the rebels captured over thirty enemy soldiers, while inflicting numerous casualties.
Two weeks later, confronting Quevedo’s 18th Battalion on the other side of the mountain, the rebels deployed similar tactics to capture over two hundred men. Meanwhile, with Sánchez Mosquera licking his wounds in Santo Domingo, the rebels tightened the noose on the 18th Battalion stranded since June 20 in the neighborhood of Jigüe, at the juncture of the La Plata and Jigüe Rivers. On the 11th of July, the 18th tried to break out and escape to the sea, only to be cut off by Paz, Miret, and others, losing its radio equipment in the process. Three days later, now without air support, the 18th tried to escape again, suffering still more losses. On the 15th, Major Quevedo managed to sneak a messenger through enemy lines, notifying the High Command of his desperate straits and pleading for aerial assistance. Assistance arrived the following day in the form of napalm. Still the rebels’ circle held, with two amphibious battalions, meant to rescue the 18th, turned away on July 17 and 18, also at great cost to men, morale, and equipment.
The drama and scale of the rebel victory at Jigüe is captured in a series of letters that Castro sent to Quevedo over the course of the week. Castro had met Quevedo at the university. When he realized that it was this same Quevedo cornered in the valley below, he reached out on July 10, the day before the fighting broke out to see if bloodshed could somehow be averted. It was hard to imagine that two university chums would one day find themselves at opposite sides of a war, Castro said. It was all the stranger given that the two men undoubtedly shared the same aspiration for their country. Castro conceded that he had spoken harshly about the military in the course of the war, but he had nothing against honest officers. As evidence, he pointed to the aftermath of El Uvero, when the rebels released thirty-five prisoners, all of whom reported being well treated and some of whom had actually returned to battle. If Quevedo and his colleagues had something to worry about, it was surely crooked and incompetent officers like Sánchez Mosquera, who were notorious for ordering young men into unwinnable situations, while punishing those who refused to take part. But Castro wrote not to harangue, simply to salute an old classmate—“on the spur of the moment, without telling you or asking for anything, only to greet you and to wish you, very sincerely, good luck.”30
On July 14, Castro reached out to Quevedo’s soldiers directly, via a script recited aloud over Radio Rebelde accompanied by music from the Medina boys. The point was not simply to inspire doubt among the impressionable youth that comprised Quevedo’s force, but to deprive it of sleep. The rebels were friends of the army, not foes, the announcers read. They wanted for Cuba only an end to violence and corruption and the restoration of constitutionalism and the rule of law. The rebels would unilaterally hold their fire the next day at noon for three hours, giving time to the soldiers to surrender. Soldiers who laid down their guns would be treated well, officers allowed to retain their weapons.31 Castro continued to reach out to Quevedo over the course of the following several days. The rebels had his men dead to rights, he warned. There was no chance they would escape. He offered Quevedo a “decorous and dignified surrender,” repeating his previous terms. Quevedo and his men would be treated with respect, he and his officers would be allowed to keep their guns.32
Four days, two battles, and many dead and wounded later, Castro tried yet again. Was Quevedo aware of what was happening? a mystified Castro wanted to know. “Company G-4 of your Battalion, which was on the beach, was completely destroyed by our forces when it tried to advance.” Quevedo’s men were being wiped out. What was the point of this? The route to La Plata was “like the pass at Thermopylae”; it couldn’t be taken no matter how many thousands of soldiers the army dispatched. Castro was loath to inflict more harm. He had his own men to look out for. The rebels had captured hundreds of enemy soldiers, some fourteen of whom were gravely wounded but could not be safely evacuated to a hospital amid a raging battle. Unequipped to manage the hundreds of prisoners falling into rebel hands, Castro had contacted the Red Cross, which agreed to come collect the wounded soldiers in a few days. If Quevedo had any doubts, he could send along the battalion’s physician to see things for himself.33
Quevedo may have been ready to surrender. His superiors were not. The following day, July 20, the Cuban Air Force treated the rebels to a seemingly endless bombardment that cost four lives and left four men wounded, two of them grievously. The bombing accomplished little more than that, however, and the Battle of Jigüe came to an end at 1:30 a.m. on the morning of July 21 when the 18th Battalion capitulated en masse. On the eve of the conflagration, Castro told Lalo Sardiñas that “this battle could mean the triumph of the Revolution.” Looking back years later, Castro referred to Jigüe as the turning point in the war, the rebels’ smashing victory demoralizing Batista’s troops while investing the July 26 Movement with legitimacy it had heretofore lacked. “From then on,” Castro recalled, “the fate of [Batista’s] force was sealed, and with it perhaps—everyone thought—the fate of the Batista tyranny itself.”34
The rebels’ success was ratified by yet another compact, the Pact of Caracas, signed in the Venezuelan capital on July 20, 1958, by a Castro agent, along with Carlos Prío, Enrique Rodríguez Loeches (Revolutionary Directorate), David Salvador (Labor Unity), Lincoln Rodon (Partido Democrata), José Puente (FEU), Captain Gabino Rodríguez Villaverde (an ex-army officer), Justo Carrillo (Montecristi), and Ángel María Santos Buch (Civic Resistance), among others. The Pact of Caracas established a new civilian revolutionary front on the terms Castro had set out in the Sierra Maestra Manifesto the previous year.
The text, written by Castro, acknowledged the belated entry into the war of the Revolutionary Directory and Prío’s Auténticos, while giving the rebels pride of place. “In each corner of Cuba,” Castro wrote, “a struggle to the death is taking place between freedom and tyranny, while abroad numerous exiles are making every effort to free the oppressed Fatherland.” Up to this time, he noted, the different factions had fought more or less independently. From here on out, they would marshal their resources in common, “aware that the co-ordination of human efforts, of war resources, of civic forces, of the political and revolutionary sectors of the opposition, including civilians, the military, workers, students, professionals, the commercial classes and citizens in general,” could finally force Batista out.
The Pact of Caracas made a special demand of the North Americans: “cease all military and other types of aid to the dictator,” while respecting the “national sovereignty and the nonmilitary, republican tradition of Cuba.” The pact concluded with a plea for unity among all Cubans innocent of Batista’s crimes. None of the opposition groups engaged with Batista forces had any enmity toward the soldiers, the signatories said. Everyday soldiers and honest officers were as essential to the new Cuba as “workers, students, professionals, businessmen, sugar plantation owners, farmers and Cubans of all religions, ideologies and races.” Cuba’s destiny, the fulfillment of its natural resources and human capacity, was within reach.35
Back in the Sierra Maestra, buoyed by his victory at Jigüe, Castro went on the offensive at Santo Domingo, first trapping the 11th Battalion in its camp, then cutting off the 22nd, which had been sent to the rescue from nearby Providencia. In three days of endless fighting in late July, the rebels cleared Santo Domingo of enemy troops. The Second Battle of Santo Domingo was costly for the rebels, with nine killed and eight wounded. But it was devastating to the army. Sánchez Mosquera, commander of the 11th Battalion, was wounded in the head and had to be evacuated by helicopter. Including prisoners, dead, and wounded, the army lost another 150 men over three days. At Jigüe and Santo Domingo combined, the rebels recovered some three hundred weapons and over 100,000 bullets, allowing them to outfit hundreds of volunteers languishing in training camps across the Sierra Maestra.
The government offensive was not over. Castro had defeated two of the three prongs of Plan F-F from the sea and the Santo Domingo valley. There remained the problem of the territory to the northwest, just over the mountain from La Plata, along a line running between the villages of Vegas de Jibacoa, Las Mercedes, Arroyón, and El Cerro. Of the three approaches to La Plata, this one provided the deepest access to the government’s heavy artillery, including T-17 and Sherman tanks. Over the course of eight exhausting days in late July, early August 1958, the rebels squared off against elements from the 10th, 12th, 17th, 19th, 20th, 21st, and 23rd Battalions, amid unremitting aerial and artillery bombardment.
While the rebels absorbed the first blows of Plan F-F, Ambassador Smith continued to debate the merits of the U.S. arms embargo with his bosses in Washington. In mid-June, Smith insisted that the Cuban government, in deploying Military Assistance Program–acquired weapons against the rebels, had not violated the restriction against the government’s using such weapons against their own people because Batista was combating “elements in league with Communism.”36 This conclusion put Smith far out ahead of colleagues both in Cuba and in Washington, who, if aware of the presence of some communists in the rebel ranks, did not regard the insurrection as fundamentally so. In a State Department memorandum dated June 26, Roy Rubottom, assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, cited “incontrovertible evidence that Cuba had failed to adhere to the MAP agreement.”37
Rubottom was not alone in concluding thus. On June 28, Raúl Castro, infuriated by evidence that Batista was skirting the embargo and that his bombers were refueling at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, captured a busload of U.S. marines on liberty outside the boundary of the naval base. Two days later, Castro contacted Ambassador Smith, pledging to release his U.S. captives if the United States ceased all military shipments (MAP-related or not) to the Batista government and stopped allowing the Cuban Air Force to refuel at Guantánamo. That same day, U.S. Admiral R. B. Ellis, commander of the naval base, wrote a memo to Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke outlining U.S. options. Among the actions contemplated were an airlift of marines to Guantánamo (“accompanied by full fanfare”), a roundup of Cubans sympathetic to the rebels on the base, a threat to support Batista’s counterinsurgency, and finally the expulsion of Cuban workers from the naval base. Ellis conceded that the last three options were likely to backfire on a base already unpopular among many Cubans. The first would likely be inconsequential.38
The kidnapping, undertaken without Fidel Castro’s authorization (in late June, he was fighting for his life above Santo Domingo), achieved its intended effect. Unsure of where the captives were being held, the U.S. government demanded Batista halt the bombing raids. Raúl Castro brandished a U.S. requisition for rocket heads and fuses bound for the Cuban military as evidence that the embargo was being violated. The State Department insisted that the shipment was meant to replace an erroneous delivery antedating the embargo. The rebels also possessed photographs of a Cuban aircraft refueling at the base, prompting the State Department to concede that Commander Ellis had allowed one Cuban bomber to refuel at the naval base on account of its being low on fuel.
Meanwhile, Castro’s men paraded the hostages, along with Park Wollam, the U.S. consul at Santiago de Cuba, around the Sierra Cristal, showing them incontrovertible proof of the damage wrought by Batista’s bombers. Wollam had gone up to the mountains to negotiate the hostages’ release. Among the evidence he was shown were fragments of U.S.-manufactured bombs and victims of napalm firebombing. “The Cuban bombing affects mainly civilian population,” Wollam wrote Ambassador Smith. “Rebels themselves have lost few men by this but claim that many civilians have suffered.” The sound of airplanes sent the local people diving for cover, Wollam reported, and for good reason; he himself had been forced to take shelter during “a similar incident in vicinity of a small church.” The Cuban Army was being its “own worst enemy.”39
Pressured by his brother, the commander in chief, Raúl Castro released the American hostages on July 18, but not before Ambassador Smith and Chief of Naval Operations Burke called for a forceful U.S. intervention to teach the rebels a lesson, prop up Batista, and preserve U.S. credibility in the region. But it was precisely to enhance U.S. credibility that the State Department adopted the arms embargo in the first place. By the late 1950s, the U.S. government’s tendency to elevate anticommunism above economic development and democratic politics did not sit well among many citizens of Latin America. Vice President Richard Nixon found this out firsthand that April and May when, on a goodwill tour of the region, he was met by audiences frustrated by his government’s apparent sympathy for dictators.
Nixon’s rude reception in Latin America and the region’s mounting hostility toward the United States was on the minds of State Department officials confronting escalating hostilities in Cuba. On June 3, 1958, Smith assured the State Department that Batista had things fully under control. The following day, Consul Wollam reported nineteen unidentified bodies dumped at the cemetery in Santiago de Cuba. The next month, another U.S. consular official described the inflationary calculus whereby every army officer killed yielded “three, four or more youths . . . shot dead the next morning beside a road outside the locality” where the original offense occurred. Summary arrests, executions, and torture were commonplace, the official reported. The country was unraveling. “A whole generation of Cuban youth has been sidetracked from normal pursuits to plotting and killing.” Parents sent their kids into exile for fear of their becoming “the innocent victims of slaying by the police or the armed forces.” The rule of law had all but disintegrated, with nine judges suspended for protesting police interference with the administration of justice.40
Amid evidence of the government’s increasingly arbitrary behavior, some in the State Department began to build the case against Castro not as a communist but as a potential dictator, as if the U.S. government had a problem with dictators. As early as July 24, 1958, State Department opinion appeared to turn against Castro as a potential replacement for Batista, with one report citing former Castro friends referring to him as “a Frankenstein” and suggesting that some of his proposals “would make him as much a dictator as Batista.” An internal State Department memorandum written July 25 concluded that from the perspective of U.S. interests the gravest danger appeared to stem from “a successful revolution by the forces of the July 26th Movement which, so far, has given no indication of political or moral responsibility.”41
The charge that Castro and the Movement lacked a sense of political and moral responsibility seems ignorant given the work that the rebels were doing in the Sierra Maestra to establish the rule of law and civil administration, as well as to build schools and hospitals, among other institutions, and suggests a diplomatic corps hopelessly ill-informed. But with Smith relying on Castro’s sworn enemies (the editor of the conservative Diario de la Marina, for instance, and Eusebio Mujal, Batista’s labor commissioner) for information about Castro, it is no wonder that some U.S. officials continued to misread him. Concern about order and stability conducive to moneymaking deafened Smith and others to Cubans’ cries for real change. In late July, Smith called on the State Department to revisit the arms embargo and so “enable Batista to step up his offensive against the Communist infiltrated rebel elements in Oriente Province, whose elimination is essential for the restoration of normalcy in Cuba.”42
In August 1958, José Miró Cardona, secretary general of the Pact of Caracas, wrote a letter to the White House on behalf of the so-called Cuban Civilian Revolutionary Front, which consisted of representatives of Cuba’s political parties, the United Labor Organization, and the FEU, imploring the U.S. government to withdraw its support for Batista.43 The White House ignored Miró Cardona’s appeal. Three weeks later, William Wieland, director of the State Department’s Office of Caribbean and Mexican Affairs, informed Miró Cardona that the accord authorizing the U.S. military missions in Cuba remained in effect and would not be withdrawn. This prompted yet another letter from Miró Cardona warning Wieland that the United States would bear “tremendous historic responsibility” for whatever fate befell Cuba upon the inevitable fall of Batista. If the U.S. government did not take action soon, he wrote, the “fighters of today” would become the “rulers of tomorrow.”44
By August 1958, the civil war had accelerated. Death and destruction exacted such a toll on both sides that there was talk of a negotiated truce. Confident that things had turned his way, Castro amplified his critique of Batista, expressing sympathy toward government troops who he believed to be deceived by the dictator’s mischaracterizations about the state of the war. Flush with enemy captives taken during the recent battles, Castro spent much of August negotiating their release with the Red Cross. The rebels’ successes left him at once optimistic and melancholy. As his ranks swelled and the ferocity of military engagements mounted, so, too, did the list of rebel casualties. These included the deaths of the capable Ramón Paz and the irrepressible René Ramos Latour, who, having exchanged the Llano for the Sierra that summer, was felled by a howitzer near Las Mercedes on July 30, 1958, one year to the day of the assassination of Frank País.
Success confronted Castro with a series of new challenges, or rather, with old challenges on a new scale. The trove of weapons harvested by the rebels in the Sierra that summer meant that they could finally outfit the hordes of volunteers gathering in Oriente. But that only raised the vexing problem of just who these volunteers were and what their motivation was. The last significant infusion of recruits back in March 1957 created discipline problems. Rebel victories that summer left Castro with weapons sufficient to outfit some five hundred new recruits, many of whom had never fired a shot and some of very dubious reputation.
The rebel victories galvanized the Miami-based opposition, now more determined than ever to ensure that Castro did not replace Batista. The U.S. government shared their alarm, engaging the Junta in frequent discussions about an alternative to Castro. Castro, of course, was well aware of these developments. He vowed that the rebels would not stop fighting until Batista was gone and a provisional government installed free of any taint of the old political parties and of U.S. influence. At the same time, he invited members of the still largely spectatorial opposition truly devoted to revolutionary change to join the final stage of battle.
In August, Castro began a correspondence with General Eulogio Cantillo, commander of Cuban forces in Oriente Province. Cantillo was a rarity among Batista’s High Command, enjoying a sterling reputation not only among army officers and the rank and file, but among rebel commanders and even the local peasantry. The rebel victory at Las Mercedes in early August left Castro with over a hundred prisoners of war, a few of them gravely injured. Castro wrote Cantillo to suggest that he dispatch a helicopter to pick up the injured prisoners. The Red Cross could be on hand to make sure that things went smoothly. Cantillo rejected Castro’s offer, insisting that he turn over Lieutenant Colonel José Quevedo, captured at Jigüe. Castro refused to surrender a prized bargaining chip, explaining his position in a long letter.45
Castro hoped to use Cantillo as a wedge to split the Cuban officers in Oriente Province from the High Command at Camp Columbia, and thus bring the fighting to a close. Despite government propaganda to the contrary, Castro insisted that the rebels were not communists or anarchists, but patriots committed to nothing so much as the unrequited dream of Cuba Libre—much like Cantillo himself. Consider the evidence, Castro urged: in nearly a year and a half of fighting, the rebels had treated their adversary with only the utmost respect, providing scrupulous care for enemy wounded—often at considerable risk to rebel troops. The contrast with Batista’s treatment of rebels and peasants alike did not bear repeating.46
Castro warned Cantillo that time was running out to get on the side of right, and by doing so play a hand in determining the war’s outcome. Once upon a time the rebels would have been eager for a negotiated settlement. Had Batista the “slightest foresight, intelligence, and historical sensibility, he could have nipped the Revolution in the bud” by cutting a deal, resigning his office, and leaving the country with all his ill-gotten gains. After all, Castro remarked, Cubans were “a forgiving and peaceful people.” Some, like Castro (and perhaps Cantillo), would have decried such an outcome, but there was ample precedent for that in Cuban history. No longer. The tables had turned, and what “might have seemed a victory a year ago, would satisfy no one today.” Cantillo faced a clear choice between joining the popular Revolution now or overseeing the “disintegration” of the Cuban Army.47
Hearing nothing from Cantillo, Castro assured the general the next month that joining the rebels would not mean relinquishing his command. The point was not to disband the army, but to redeem it by “inspiring a revolutionary action in its heart.” Castro wanted to facilitate this end. Together, the forces of right could conquer Oriente, occupy its cities, and commandeer its garrisons, leaving Batista with no choice but to step down. The Revolution was going to triumph, Castro said. The only question was whether the intervention of a military man of Cantillo’s stature could prevent the descent into violence that greeted the fall of Machado.48
Cantillo did not respond to these letters either. Castro was not fazed. He was confident that the rebels’ march down out of the mountains, across Oriente, and soon (he hoped) into Camagüey and Las Villas would force Cantillo to the table soon enough.
When he was not pestering Cantillo, Castro continued to establish legal and administrative control over the Liberated Territory of Cuba. In early September, he heard reports of rebel soldiers exacting weapons and taxes from local businesses without authorization. In response, he announced new regulations governing the rebels’ relationship with the local community, which included the warning that anyone found guilty of extorting the neighbors would be treated “like assassins.”
Back in February 1958, with the assistance of the acting legal counsel Humberto Sorí Marín (a former Auténtico Party member), Castro published the First Law of the Sierra Maestra, which included penal, civil, and administrative codes designed to discipline the rebels’ swelling ranks. In early October, he was back at it, issuing a series of decrees setting prices and establishing taxes on commodities like sugar, rice, tobacco, soap, and cooking oil. He also announced strict penalties for production, distribution, and consumption of marijuana, evidently a burgeoning industry in farms throughout the Sierra.
On October 10, 1958, the ninetieth anniversary of the Grito de (or Shout of ) Yara, which launched the Cuban War of Independence against Spain, Castro published Laws 2 and 3 of the Liberated Territory of Cuba. Law No. 2 forbade citizens of Oriente Province from participating in the upcoming presidential election, which Castro considered a fraud for proceeding in a climate of intimidation solidified by the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Any politician running for office picked up in Oriente would be sentenced to death, Castro warned; ordinary citizens visiting the polling places would be banned from political or military service for years.
Law No. 3, entitled “On the Right of the Peasants to the Land,” put muscle on the skeleton of the agricultural reform program that Castro first announced in “History Will Absolve Me.” Cuba’s economic progress depended on the expansion of industry, Castro explained. Rich in natural and human resources, the country was being held back by its dependence on sugar. Law No. 3 promised to diversify Cuban agriculture and industry by offering incentives, tariff protection, and credit to stimulate private enterprise. Castro pointed to United Nations studies to back up this law. Exports, he explained, were essential to foreign exchange, without which there could be no imports, no consumption, and hence no improvement in Cubans’ standard of living.
The principal impediment to this vision of a flourishing, diversified, government-supported private economy was “the misery of the rural areas,” the law declared. Despite progress made by the Sugar Coordination Act of 1937, many Cuban farmers did not own their land. Law No. 3 cited 1953 census figures showing that some 200,000 farmers operated as tenants, sharecroppers, settlers, and squatters on land owned by absentee landlords. Insecurity bred by this arrangement inevitably stifled productivity, as individuals who did not own the land they farmed had little incentive to improve it—“as universal experience demonstrates.”
The 1940 Cuban Constitution based “the legitimacy of private property on its social function,” Castro said. Insisting that “Revolution is the source of right,” Law No. 3 promised to make things right for the peasant population that Castro had come to admire during the war. Peasants had comprised the rank and file in the War of Independence, the law said; peasants bore the brunt of the ongoing contest with Batista. The 1940 Constitution included promises, largely unmet, to provide land to squatters, tenants, and sharecroppers. With this new law, Castro vowed to deliver on past promises by divvying up state land, purchasing and dividing private property, setting fair prices, and ensuring small producers access to grinding mills and markets.49
The details of the Agrarian Reform Law would be left to the conclusion of the war. By mid-October, Castro saw signs that the end was near. The previous month, he dispatched Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara and their two separate columns into central Cuba. On October 9, Cienfuegos sent word that he had arrived in Santa Clara after a harrowing forty-plus days slog through swamps and rain, with little food and less sleep, all the while dodging government troops who this time lay in wait for them. All the advantages they had come to take for granted in the Sierra Maestra, above all local support, were wanting on the journey. News of their arrival with their columns largely intact seemed miraculous to Castro. “I can’t describe the emotion I felt in rereading your report of the ninth,” he wrote Cienfuegos. Surely, this ranked among the feats of the great Mambises. “With the invading columns lies our prestige, our motivation, our history, our people,” he wrote. “Nobody but nobody can stop us now.”50
The Cuban Army was not the only adversary Cienfuegos and Guevara had to dodge along the way. In Las Villas Province, the July 26 Movement had a small rebel force under the command of Víctor Bordón. Bordón had been fighting alongside another group of guerrillas commanded by Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, a member of the new Second National Front of the Escambray, which had splintered off from the Revolutiony Directory. When Guevara arrived in Las Villas, Bordón announced that he was going to combine his forces with those of his fellow Movement member. Gutiérrez Menoyo objected, arresting Bordón and seizing his weapons.
Gutiérrez Menoyo’s treatment of Bordón surprised and dismayed Castro. Of course, there had been disagreements between the Movement and the Directory about strategy and tactics, he told Cienfuegos. But when members of the Directory first landed in Northern Oriente the previous year, Castro had tried to come to their assistance by launching a diversionary attack along the southern coast. The Movement would accept no other leader in Las Villas than Guevara, Castro said. The Movement’s record of sacrifice and success gave it and it alone the right to call the shots. This was no time for stupid “quarrels and division.” Castro counseled Cienfuegos to be “tactful and delicate” in dealing with Menoyo. The rebels should resort to force only in self-defense, or when “a vital revolutionary necessity was at stake.” In that case, they must act “drastically and decisively,” resolving things once and for all. The rebels must never succumb to infighting. The closer the Revolution came to triumph the more traps would be thrown in its way. By always acting with dignity, they would win the confidence and support of the masses.51
When not playing the part of peacekeeper, Castro was assuming the role of head of state. In mid-October, he learned that Britain had agreed to provide arms to Batista. In Law No. 4 of the Free Territory of Cuba, he denounced the deal as an act of war, declaring an embargo against British goods, while appropriating British property wherever he could. He gave British citizens ten days to leave Oriente Province, after which they would be subject to arrest and detention. What in the world had England to gain by exercising its power over tiny Cuba? he asked.52
At the end of the month, Castro was given the opportunity to demonstrate his statesmanship once more after word reached him from the region of northeast Oriente Province that the U.S. seemed to be seeking a pretext to intervene in the war on the side of Batista. First, the army withdrew troops from the Yateras River, source of the water supply for the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. This forced the U.S. Navy to dispatch marines to secure the site, thereby engineering a potential showdown with Raúl Castro’s men. Then, two U.S. citizens were detained by the rebels after inadvertently walking into a rebel ambush. Finally, Batista withdrew troops from the U.S. nickel plant near the town of Nicaro, inviting the rebels to occupy the plant. As if on cue, U.S. State Department spokesman Lincoln White railed against alleged Castro aggressions. In response, Castro explained that U.S. citizens were not the only ones inconvenienced by the ongoing war. Responsibility for the current conflict lay not at the rebels’ feet but at those of the “tyranny itself, which for the last seven years oppresses our people while retaining the support of the North American ambassadors.”53